Chapter 15 #2
Not a twitch. Not the ghost of something that might be amusement if you squint.
A smile, real, warm, curving across the king's face in a way that changes the entire shape of it.
The scar across his eye shifts. The severe lines soften.
His teeth are visible, white and slightly imperfect, and the expression makes him look younger, less guarded, less the king and more the man who has been carrying a weight all night and has just been told he can set it down.
He looks positively dashing, and Indrie's face, which had been starting to cool, flames all over again. He drops his gaze to the sheets and wills himself to stop.
And then, beneath the mortification, beneath the frantic surface-level panic, something quieter, rising up from a deeper place, a place he didn't know existed until two weeks ago, and it says:
You were in his bed. His body was against yours. His arms were around you. And you weren't awake for it.
The thought is very upsetting.
Not because it happened, he understands, rationally, that it was necessary, that the cold would have killed him, that Eskil did what any experienced northerner would do for someone pulled from the water.
He's a healer. He knows about body heat and hypothermia and the practicalities of warming someone who can't warm themselves. The medicine of it makes sense.
But the rest of it, the part that isn't medicine, the part that is just Indrie, aches with a loss he can't explain.
He was there. In the arms he's been thinking about for days, pressed against the chest he's been watching from across the deck, held by the hands that touched his chin and his throat and his palm.
He was surrounded by Eskil, his warmth, his scent, the steady rhythm of his heartbeat, and he missed it.
He was unconscious. The one time, the only time, the closest he may ever come to being held by this man, and he slept through it.
He wants to scream, or laugh, or both.
And then, close on the heels of that thought: you wanted to be awake for it.
Not because he needed to know what was happening.
Not because he wanted to ensure his safety.
He wanted to be awake because he wanted to feel it.
Wanted to feel Eskil's arms around him and know it was happening.
Wanted to feel the heat of him, the weight of him, the particular pressure of being held by someone so much larger.
Wanted to press back into that warmth and hear Eskil breathe against his hair and feel the rise and fall of his chest.
The desire is not new. It's been building, he catalogued it in the galley just yesterday morning and assigned it a name.
But knowing he's attracted to someone and wanting to lie naked in their arms are different magnitudes of the same earthquake, and this one has just leveled everything he thought he understood about himself.
He looks away. Stares at the wall. Stares at the trunk. Stares at anything that isn't the half-dressed king radiating warmth beside him.
"I don't know how I will ever repay you," he says, and his voice is too quiet but steady enough to pass as composed if one doesn't look too closely. "For saving me. We could have both drowned. We could have been lost at sea."
Eskil reaches out and brushes the hair from his eyes.
Indrie freezes.
His hair is down and salt-stiff, hanging around his face and shoulders, and Eskil's hand moves through it with a gentleness that makes Indrie's entire body go still.
His fingers catch a strand, tuck it behind Indrie's ear, linger for a fraction of a second against the curve of his jaw before withdrawing.
The touch is brief. Tender. Unhurried, Eskil taking all the time in the world and choosing to spend this particular second touching Indrie's hair.
All Indrie can think about is those hands on him while he slept.
Those fingers, the same ones that just brushed his jaw, working his shirt over his head.
Pulling his trousers down. Touching skin that no one has ever touched.
And then the same hands pulling him close, wrapping around him, holding him against a chest that Indrie can see right now, scarred and broad and close enough to reach out and...
He forces himself to breathe.
"You don't owe me anything," Eskil says. His voice is careful, paced for Indrie's benefit. "It doesn't work here the way it does where you're from. You don't save a life and then demand payment. You don't save a life and expect servitude."
Indrie's brow furrows. The words register, he comprehends them individually, can parse the grammar well enough, but the meaning behind them is foreign beyond language.
In Kalkoa, every act of preservation came with a price.
Every meal, every blanket, every night he was allowed to sleep without being summoned, all of it was conditional.
All of it was debt. You were kept alive because you were useful, and your usefulness was the repayment, and if your usefulness ran out, so did the keeping.
He's already in servitude to the king. The king took him.
He owns him. Indrie is here because he was given away, and whatever kindness Eskil has shown, the stars, the touches, the ocean rescue, the warmth of his body through a freezing night, is the kindness of an owner to a possession.
It has to be. Because the alternative, the possibility that Eskil is kind to him simply because he wants to be, because Indrie as a person merits kindness, that's too much. That's too dangerous to believe.
"I'm already in your service," Indrie says, confused. He swallows. "They gave me to you."
Eskil's expression changes.
The warmth drains from the king's face with a swiftness that is almost violent.
What replaces it is something thunderous, a darkening, a tightening, the severe lines of his face drawing together into an expression that Indrie has seen directed at disobedient crew members and enemy combatants but never, until this moment, at him.
Indrie's blood goes cold.
He's gone too far. He's overstepped. He spoke out of turn, said something he shouldn't have, and the king's face is proof of it. The smile and the gentle hand in his hair evaporate under the storm front moving across Eskil's features, and Indrie's body responds before his mind can intervene.
He knows anger. Knows it in his bones, in his marrow, in the cellular memory of five years under a hand that struck first and asked questions never.
He knows what anger looks like, the tightening jaw, the narrowed eyes, the flare of nostrils that precedes the explosion.
He knows what it feels like, the temperature change in the room, the compression of air itself.
And he knows what comes after it.
Eskil sucks in a breath and Indrie shuts his eyes and braces himself.
His shoulders come up. His chin drops. His hands release the sheet and cross over his chest, forearms pressed together, creating a barrier between his body and the blow that's coming.
It's a posture earned from being hit enough times to develop a standardized response, efficient and automatic, every vulnerable part shielded as much as possible.
He waits. The seconds stretch. His breath is held behind his teeth and his body is coiled and ready and he can feel the blood draining from his face.
But the strike does not come.
When the strong, warm hand touches his face it is as gentle as before.
It cups his cheek, palm against his jaw, fingers curving behind his ear, thumb resting on the ridge of his cheekbone, and turns his face toward Eskil.
The touch is so at odds with what Indrie was expecting that his eyes open out of surprise more than anything, the reflex of a mind that has received contradictory information and needs visual confirmation to reconcile it.
Eskil's expression is still severe. The anger hasn't left, it's there, in the hard line of his mouth and the tension in his brow and the muscle that works in his jaw. But Indrie looks into his eyes, those pale, storm-grey eyes, and realizes that the anger is not directed at him.
It's at what he said. Yes. But because of what the words meant.
Because of what they revealed, about what Indrie believes, about what he's been taught to believe, about the world that shaped him and broke him and sent him into Eskil's path with the certainty that his worth is measured in usefulness and his life is currency to be traded.
Eskil is angry at the people who made Indrie think this way.
"I do not own you, Indrie." Eskil's voice is low and deep and very serious. Each word is placed with precision, deliberate, weighted, meant to build something that will hold. "No one owns you. Not me. Not anyone."
Indrie stares back. Shocked. The hand on his face is warm and steady and his name in Eskil's mouth sounds different than it's ever sounded in anyone else's. It sounds important.
"They gave me to you," Indrie reiterates. "To serve you."
"They gave you away because they're fools who couldn't see what they had.
" Eskil's jaw is tight, the words coming through his teeth.
"But giving you away doesn't make you mine.
You are not something to be given. You are not a crate of iron or a barrel of salt or a, a...
" He breaks off, frustrated, reaching for simpler vocabulary that Indrie will understand.
He's speaking faster now, the careful pacing abandoned.
"You are a person. A free person. You were free the moment you stepped onto my ship, and you will be free when you step off it, and no one in my kingdom will ever... "